Course
Cluster Analysis in R
IntermediateSkill Level
Updated 11/2024RMachine Learning4 hr16 videos52 Exercises3,800 XP43,896Statement of Accomplishment
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Learn How to Perform Cluster Analysis
Cluster analysis is a powerful toolkit in the data science workbench. It is used to find groups of observations (clusters) that share similar characteristics. These similarities can inform all kinds of business decisions; for example, in marketing, it is used to identify distinct groups of customers for which advertisements can be tailored.Explore Hierarchical and K-Means Clustering Techniques
In this course, you will learn about two commonly used clustering methods - hierarchical clustering and k-means clustering. You won't just learn how to use these methods, you'll build a strong intuition for how they work and how to interpret their results. You'll develop this intuition by exploring three different datasets: soccer player positions, wholesale customer spending data, and longitudinal occupational wage data.Hone Your Skills with a Hands-On Case Study
You’ll finish the course by applying your new skills to a case study based around average salaries and how they have changed over time. This will combine hierarchical clustering techniques such as occupation trees, preparing for exploration, and plotting occupational clusters, with k-means techniques including elbow analysis and average silhouette widths.DataCamp courses are comprised of a mixture of videos, articles, and practice exercises so that you have the chance to test and cement your new-found skills so that you feel confident applying them outside a course setting.
Prerequisites
Intermediate R1
Calculating Distance Between Observations
Cluster analysis seeks to find groups of observations that are similar to one another, but the identified groups are different from each other. This similarity/difference is captured by the metric called distance. In this chapter, you will learn how to calculate the distance between observations for both continuous and categorical features. You will also develop an intuition for how the scales of your features can affect distance.
2
Hierarchical Clustering
This chapter will help you answer the last question from chapter 1—how do you find groups of similar observations (clusters) in your data using the distances that you have calculated? You will learn about the fundamental principles of hierarchical clustering - the linkage criteria and the dendrogram plot - and how both are used to build clusters. You will also explore data from a wholesale distributor in order to perform market segmentation of clients using their spending habits.
3
K-means Clustering
In this chapter, you will build an understanding of the principles behind the k-means algorithm, learn how to select the right k when it isn't previously known, and revisit the wholesale data from a different perspective.
4
Case Study: National Occupational Mean Wage
In this chapter, you will apply the skills you have learned to explore how the average salary amongst professions have changed over time.
Cluster Analysis in R
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FAQs
What is cluster analysis?
Cluster analysis is an important technique in data science, where you organize items into groups (clusters) based on shared characteristics. It’s an unsupervised machine learning algorithm, meaning that you don’t know how many clusters your data might have before running the model, and there are no assumptions made about likely relationships within your data. The most common uses for cluster analysis are to classify objects in data; for example, in market research, you might identify categories like age, income, and type of residence.
Is R good for cluster analysis?
R is an excellent programming language for cluster analysis tasks. It has a number of functions that help you to prepare the data, partition it (via K-means clustering), and plot cluster solutions.
What is hierarchical clustering?
Hierarchical clustering is an algorithm used to group similar objects into clusters that have a predetermined ordering from top to bottom.
What is K-Means clustering?
K-Means clustering is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm often used in statistics and data mining. K-Means algorithms group together data points based on certain similarities.
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